Coles reels in sustainable tuna policy

COLES said it was doing the right thing when putting this popular product on its shelves. But now, the supermarket giant has been accused of misleading customers.

TASTE PRESTON COLUMN supermarket shopping trolley filled with grocery shopping

COLES has been accused of misleading consumers by stocking a species of tuna it had previously described as “in danger of being overfished”.

The supermarket’s new home brand tuna, which hit shelves about one week ago, uses pole-and-line-caught yellowfin tuna sourced from a coastal fishery in the Maldives.

Yellowfin, found throughout the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans, is classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as “near-threatened”.

Coles own “canned tuna sustainable sourcing policy” states the supermarket only uses skipjack tuna. “Coles only sources tuna that has been shown by leading scientists to be from stocks that are not overfished,” it said.

“Our canned products are skipjack tuna from either the Indian Ocean or the western and central Pacific Ocean. In these oceans, scientists report that skipjack stocks are at healthy population levels.

“We do not source yellowfin, southern bluefin or bigeye tuna, all of which are overfished, or are in danger of being overfished.”

Coles removed the document from its website on Thursday after being contacted by news.com.au.

In a statement, a Coles spokeswoman said the new range had been certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). “Until recently, we did not sell yellowfin tuna as there was not a sustainable source available,” she said.

“We review our sourcing program constantly and when the MSC certified pole-and-line yellowfin tuna as sustainable, we worked with our suppliers to provide this product to our customers at a great price.”

Greenpeace Australia Pacific oceans campaigner Nathaniel Pelle said the move was “disappointing”.

“If you’re going to have a policy on sustainable sourcing, then you shouldn’t change that policy just because you want to add a new product to your line,” he said.

Coles’ Responsibly Sourced Seafood microsite.

The Canned Tuna Sustainable Sourcing Policy has been taken down.

But Mr Pelle stressed that Coles had one of the better sustainable sourcing practices, describing Woolworths as a “relative dinosaur compared to Coles”.

He said the product itself was “pretty clean”, but said customers should buy skipjack if they want to be sure they’re buying responsibly fished canned tuna.

“It’s a species that’s much more abundant, breeds faster and is not in the sort of danger that yellowfin is,” he said.

“The only reason yellowfin is not worse off in the Indian Ocean is because of the amount of piracy from Somalia that’s driven fishing boats away.”

Greenpeace has previously criticised MSC for granting certification to controversial fisheries where stocks were actually tumbling, arguing customers were being “duped”.

In 2011, the group hit out at a number of controversial rulings, including the awarding of an MSC label to the Ross Sea Antarctic toothfish fishery, which was still regarded by scientists as an “exploratory fishery”, and the Eastern Bering Sea pollock fishery where stock levels fell 64 per cent between 2004 and 2009.

Marine biologist Chris Pincetich told The Guardian the MSC had “rushed to accept applications from hundreds of fisheries around the globe in order to grow their business and network”.

“Many of those are actually viewed by scientists as unsustainable,” he said. “They should really take a closer look before they even engage with those fisheries.”

An MSC spokeswoman said the certification was only granted after a 12- to 18-month assessment process conducted by independent scientists, scoring against 31 key performance indicators.

The Maldives fishery was only certified in 2014. “It’s a fantastic fishery that supports the local economy of a developing island nation,” she said.

“What’s really out of date is a blanket fish list that says this species is bad, this species is good. MSC was created so that you didn’t have blanket rankings for species.

“Similar to Fairtrade, you can’t just say all coffee from Africa is socially unjust; you look for the certified Fairtrade stamp and trust that it’s met the Fairtrade standard.”

The organisation will tomorrow announce Australia’s first MSC-certified yellowfin tuna fishery off Mooloolaba on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast.

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